How to retrieve data accidentally overwritten by a time machine backup? Ugent!

[mudisemail]

Hi, I connected my windows removable disk to my colleague's mac to transfer some data. Accidentally her system started a time machine backup on my removable disk. Although we stopped it during middle of the process, now my disk is no longer recognizable in windows and all I can see under a mac system is her backup file.

The process took a very short time. I wonder if it has deleted everything. Is there any chance I can get the overwritten data back? They are very important to me.

Besides, is it a common problem of time machine backup? It is too dangerous for the removable disks. :confused:

[steveza]

Get a tool like irecover (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm) and use that to recover the partition(s) on the disk.

[spinnerlys]

If data is overwritten (meaning 1s and 0s of some old file are replaced by new 1s and 0s of another file) it is difficult to recover that data with normal software.

But chances are good that old data was not replaced new data.

I don't know if it's a common problem of Time Machine to just us an external disk as back up device, but normally Mac OS asks you, if you want to use a just connected (and never before) external disk as a Time Machine.